Clinging On
by templremus1990
Summary: Erm, don't ask me where this one came from. Just a random oneshot, Jackie's POV, reflecting on her daughter's relationship with the Doctor. NineTenRose, some angst, some humour, set preDoomsday, some time after Age of Steel. Please R&R...


**Clinging On**

When Jackie looked back, she often thought it had been Jimmy Stone's fault. It gave her someone to blame, after all, and Jimmy was much easier to hate than anyone else. A tall, long-haired boy who seemed to own more tattoos than he did clean clothes, he was the epitome of excitement to her daughter at the age of sixteen; three years older than her, he bought her drinks, took her driving, and lived on his own. She should have read the signs, really, and the guilt was to hang vaguely at the back of her mind forever afterwards. What scared her most, however, was the loss of control. Suddenly her beautiful blonde-haired, big-smiling daughter was no longer a girl, but a woman, and one no less in need of her protection, just too proud to ask for it. She had also discovered what she already knew; namely, that Rose Marion Tyler never did anything half-heartedly, even when it would hurt her.

So she watched her daughter drop out of school, move from flat to flat, argue with her, storm out, come back four months later at half-past one in the morning with an untold level of debt and a duffel bag of all her worldly possessions, and she gritted her teeth and bore it out, if only because she trusted Rose to save herself. And Rose did, as best she could. A job in Henrick's department store, a new, subdued wardrobe, a sensible boyfriend. It was hardly revolutionary, but after what she had gone through, it didn't need to be. It was safe, and it ought to be happy, and Jackie was glad to see her daughter smile, though she could never escape the feeling that those last two years had only set her back where she had begun, just as directionless, only a little more hurt and a little less content with what she had. She thanked God for Mickey on an almost daily basis, whose powers of persistence and constant concern for her daughter's well-being made her wonder after a while whether it was Rose who needed him, or the other way around.

Then _he_ arrived in their lives and any doubts of the answer to that question were dispelled.

She felt Rose's loss every hour of every day for that year, replaying that last bright and cheerful call home for some indication, some hint of what was to come. She watched the phone, ran up missing person posters, carried on, and fell apart slowly while no-one was watching. When at last her daughter returned with the man Jackie had thought a policeman the sick guilt returned for allowing a stranger to get close enough to take her daughter. He was the second man to feel the force of Jackie Tyler's palm on account of Rose. It was getting to be a pattern.

Then he pulled reality and everything else out from under her feet once more and they were off, leaving her and Mickey to count the seconds as they had done for the past year. She thought about him a lot after that. He scared her in a way Jimmy had never done, even when he had been at his most drunk and furious, because _his_ hold over Rose was something she had never seen in her daughter before. It didn't even come close to love; it went beyond that, into a relationship which she could never share in because they needed no-one else.

"He's good in a crisis, I'll give 'im that." She trusted him now, despite knowing fully that it was with her own daughter's life and that his existence seemed to revolve around crises. He thrived on danger, ran with it, and Rose ran with him, and Jackie knew she could never stop them. Most days she no longer wanted to, either. To see her daughter alive in a way she had never been before, not even during the initial rush of schoolgirl infatuation with Jimmy; on the good days she thanked him for such a chance. On the bad ones she would fixate on what she had seen of life in that mad blue box, which her tiny glimpses into her daughter's new existence had afforded her. She thought of the destruction, the uncertainty and the recklessness of it all, and she knew that he could never keep his promise to her in a world like that.

The second time she thought Rose lost she had watched her go, carried by the force of a power she could not even begin to understand, but which she knew would do anything to keep _him_ safe, just as Rose had done and would do again and again if she had to.

When he finally returned he was unconscious much of the time, which was a good thing, because she would most probably have torn him limb from limb otherwise. The new face was just a confirmation of what she had known all along, but which Rose had pushed away: he was alien.

Then he had woken up and saved the day once more, and Rose had fallen for him hard, fast and all over again.

Whereas the old him had been withdrawn and reckless almost to the point of mania, this one was more open, smiled less broadly but less painfully, laughed more. Jackie got the feeling Rose had changed him far more than the whole new-face affair had done, though she still preferred not to dwell on the latter too much. He had a kind of child-like energy and wonder to him that Rose delighted in, and shared in everything they did. And from the moment her daughter's hand curled around the old-new one stretched out to her, Jackie knew that was it. The madcap dash to keep up with him was over. She had seen him at his best and at his worst, and she had taken it all, and now they were ready to change each other all over again. They got a proper goodbye this time, and Jackie was grateful for that.

She never understood why the Doctor always left it a few months between visits. Whenever she asked him he would launch into one of his endless monologues on the nature of timelines and the spatial-temporal physics of relative dimensions that made her head hurt, so she stopped questioning and just took each day as it came. When they returned everything would be noise, and laughter, and stories, and she forgot the worry for a few hours and learned to live in the moment with them. Rose brought her presents; a piece of the fifth moon of Jurdax, an alien tooth that played music inside the owner's mind when held, tea from a thirtieth century colony.

"They cut it with some kinda root from the solar system round Betelgeuse, it's amazin', really wakes you up…"

Jackie kept all these gifts in Rose's room, on the shelf that had once held school certificates and snippets from girly magazines. They felt more suited to the Rose she knew than anything else in that room did now. Rose had taken most of what she needed; the rest belonged to a girl long since gone, who had a crush on the big grown-up boy three years above her and who put circles above her 'i's because she thought it looked cute, who owned three pink fluffy pens and whose taste in men was displayed in posters on the wall. Still, Jackie kept the room made up, the magazines stacked in a corner, the bed made. It made her daughter's return feel more definite, as if Rose really was just 'travelling' and would ring her at three in the morning again asking to be picked up and taken home, tanned and jet-lagged and ready to go back to the way things were.

Every now and then Jackie got to look at them together, in a rare moment of standing still. Rose would have her hand in his, or her head on his shoulder; she was always a tactile person. They would be completing each other's sentences, nodding at the other's story, or smiling at a memory she could only guess at, but which she knew they shared. When Mickey went home to a place Jackie could not understand those moments became something more. Rose needed him now in a way she had not done so before, and her hand closed more tightly over his, her eyes watching him more closely, drinking in every moment, afraid to let him go.

Rose Marion Tyler never did anything half-heartedly, even when it would hurt her. And when she watched them save each other, and the Universe for good measure, Jackie knew that falling in love would be no exception. Some things never change, no matter what happens and how much you might wish otherwise. Yet somehow, Jackie could not feel guilty this time, wish she had read the signs before, put her foot down, pulled her daughter out and saved her all the pain to come. Instead she watched him teach her how to live and how to lose, how to move on and how to stand tall, and she saw that he knew forever, knew that she could not have it and still be safe.

She could not trust him not to break her daughter's heart, because he seemed to have a talent for it. But she knew he could trust him to risk everything he had in order to protect them all.

Just sometimes, that was enough.


End file.
